Heidi McKenzie is a ceramic artist based in Toronto, Canada. She completed her MFA at OCADU in 2014. Heidi is informed by her mixed-race Caribbean/Irish heritage. She uses photography, digital media, and archive to forefront themes of ancestry, race, migration and colonization. Heidi has created in Ireland, Denmark, Hungary, Australia, China and Indonesia. Heidi’s work was recently acquired by the Royal Ontario Museum. Her solo exhibition at the Gardiner Museum, Reclaimed: Indo-Caribbean HerStories (2023) and installation, Girmitya HerStories (2024), at the Indian Ceramics Triennale in Delhi, give voice to Indo-Caribbean women through a feminist lens.
I grew up in Fredericton, New Brunswick, the daughter of an Indo-Trinidadian immigrant who married an Irish-American woman—a brown face in a sea of white. My lived experience propelled me to engage with issues of race, identity, and representation. I work with archive, memory and ancestry. I often integrate muti-media, video, augmented reality and soundscape to enhance the narrative story-telling in my installations. I began working with sepia-toned, iron-oxide rich archival photography on ceramic, rendering my father’s life and telling the stories of his ancestors. I persisted in using ceramic material in the production process, fusing coloured ceramic pigments onto hand-rolled porcelain.
Following the ideas of cultural theorist Ariella Azoulay, my work engages the socio-political landscape of my ancestors, purposefully shedding light on the under- represented stories of migrant and/or racialized peoples. I have recently begun to reach beyond the ceramics medium, incorporating fabrics, digital collage, cyanotype, mylar, and steel structures into m work. My 2025 solo exhibition in Montreal responds to my destabilization upon learnig of my father’s involvement in Canada’s largest race riots, “The Forgotten Man – Reckoing The Sir George Williams Protests, 1969 . I am in early stages of exploring my mother’s Irish ancestors, the farmers from Northern Ireland who worked the flax fields and came to Canada to work the land post Famine.
My work asks the viewer to consider, acknowledge, understand, and transmute in our times the historical barriers of class, race and colonialization. Holding space and making place for people of colour matters. Telling my family’s stories matter.